Perhaps we were stealing a march into the future upon Inspector Robot in making such use of his glasses. I remembered he had tried to steal a march upon me when he sought to ape the features of the great judge at the trial on the third bank of the river of space.
We did not have long to wait. Gleaming, dazzling messengers were sighted on their way from the settlement we were seeking. The sun appeared to blaze on the trail that they cut through the long grasses …
I STOPPED. All at once the lines — ‘Perhaps we were stealing a march, etc., etc.’ — that had been dictated to me within the theatre of the future — as it drew me to recall the past — seemed too inflexible (inflexible fossil-humour?), lines steeped, I felt, in an aroma that filled me with unease. ‘Whyunease?’ said the dictating Voice, ‘why did you stop? I am no future dictator you have come upon, I am not dictating what you may continue to record on the fourth bank. Such apparent dictation and its aroma stemfrom — let me put it this way — transparencies of the unconscious. And these have an inimitable style of their own that seems dictation from an alien source. They can be very disturbing. Conscience is the spark you are seeking to trace within every dazzling transparency and within unique atmospheres and fossil-strata above you and beneath you. Fire was the atmospherichumour in which you read the nameless hand and its writings before you came through the trail to where you now are.
‘Now it’s not that strict fire which you experience in this reach of future time. It’s another element, an element that has evolved from imprints of fire, an element that is not fire in any ordinary sense yet it smoulders into a consciousness that does not burn but may for that very reason be unbearable, well-nigh unbearable, at times.
‘It is the spark of the living Word that you seek, the sacred Word. And that’s akin to a compulsion even as it indicates liberation. It’s upsetting. It’s a style that drives you on but leaves you unsettled, even unhappy. The touch of long-dead, buried masters who travelled into the future long, long ago and who are intent on helping you in the quest for truth, yes,truth I say — truth that is interwoven with a sacred kind of self-deception(odd business I know)but without which — without that peculiar interweave — conscience would not exist. You will see and it will shake you, Anselm.’
I would see in due course. That was his promise. I wanted to close my ears to the voice or voices of the transparent unconscious. But it was impossible to do so. What was the last image I received when I saw‘the gleaming, dazzling messengers’ approaching?
The sun appeared to blaze on the trail that they cut through the long grasses. It was the glistening drums they carried, and other adornments on their bodies, that made them shine. I recalled Proteus’s half-jesting remark to Rose in the hillside cabin on the third bank of the river of space: ‘infant lighthouse of science’. I was not sure I had remembered exactly but it helped us to feel partially at home with the savages of the past one perceived in a burning, non-burning light from a tower or tent in the future.
We looked through Robot’s glasses within transparencies of the unconscious at the ancient masquerade of a newborn tribe. They wore a long subtly woven belt — or shining umbilicus-eel — that issued from the region of their navel and coiled itself around their bodies to reach their shoulder and neck.
It was as if they bore the brunt of a fault within the inner/outer body of brightest innocence one could scarcely visualize except as a jest of nature. The bright umbilicus or eel brought home the drowned children (the Shadowy obscure bodies of the drowned children) we had brought to them for ritual burial. And the ease with which the eel had coiled itself around them suggested an intimacy with the elements (with the fluid electricity of the elements, animal electricity, animal ‘lighthouse’) that revived in me an attachment to the mother of light and darkness (the twin-Rose) who had spared my life.
Were they pitiless phantoms in the fossil-strata of the unconscious or harbingers of hope?
‘Eel’ or ‘umbilicus’ equalled ‘electricity’.
That was the nature of their innocent jest, innocent transgression into consuming technology, consuming spires of electricity that would pierce the heavens and rival the stars. The gift of life was a gift of terrifying responsibility.
‘Eel’ or ‘infant lighthouse’ equalled a ‘fault’ in the generation of innocence within the depths of nature and as a consequence one was prone to worship nature and yet to recoil from it.
Before we knew what had happened they had surrounded us. They flattened our tower or tent in a flash and we were pulled without further ado into the long grasses as into a river of passions. The green swell of the grassy tide hemmed us in yet swept us along. The white waving crest of the sun sang with non-burning heat. It was a river as well as a lake or sea into which the band or tribe took us. The Shadow of my ‘drowned child’ had been snatched from my arms but Ross and Penelope still held theirs. I dreamt of long ancient spars and the rigging of sailing ships sprouting from the bodies of men. I dreamt of the wrecked cabin on a waving hillside in which my uncle Proteus had pleaded with my twin-mother Rose for my life.
It was a Dream of such power the cabin became preternaturally real. It became the grain of expeditions in space seen from a newborn standpoint of truth and self-deception. Truth in that it was a vivid articulation from within the unconscious of the perils I faced when my mother was taken ill and I was infected by the very Asian flu epidemic in Alicia’s household: an illness that occurred in the very year or month that my mother’s twin sister gave birth to my half-brother Lucius Canaima. The two happenings were so blended — my mother’s and my illness (on one hand) and the pregnancy of the other Rose and the birth of her child (on the other) — that I was deceived by patterns of memory into dreaming my recovery from illness occurred in a cabin on a waving hillside the day I was born and that my half-brother (five years younger than I) was my ageless twin born on the same day. His age tended to vary in the recurring Dream, five years, six years younger, five years, six years older than I. Sometimes born in my skin, I in his. He was ageless. He was elusive. Our mother was the twin-Rose …
How had I come into such knowledge of hidden family relationships (Harold and the Rose sisters) in my Aunt Alicia’s household? Had I overheard her and Proteus talking? Had I known it all in childhood and suppressed it into symbolic truth, symbolic distortion, symbolic displacement of seniority (saints/sinners) until it erupted in the corridor of the third bank of the river of space in my book of dreams?
I dreamt that Proteus pleaded with the twin-Rose my mother for my life the day I was born and that Canaima lay not far from me in the cabin. It was all utterly real — my recovery from illness in Proteus’s plea — and yet as I retraced my steps I perceived a magical and profound self-deception. I saw now what the Voice had been implying but a short while ago: conscience would not exist, the spark of conscience that apprises us of the invaluable texture of life, the gift of creative life, the necessity to give an account of our thoughts and our deeds, would vanish were it not for truth (the vividness of eternal truth) and magical self-deception to which we confess, a magic that opens the way to reshape, revise, penetrate again and again, unravel, ravel again and again the materials of age and youth and childhood and desire (the materials of experience) that we build into a cabin or a ship or a house or whatever tapestry of implicit being asserts our pilgrimage in space.